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Brain candy for Happy MutantsTue, 31 Mar 2015 18:00:17 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Burning Man temple to heal Ireland's Troubles, IRL and in Minecrafthttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/19/burning-man-temple-to-heal-ire.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/19/burning-man-temple-to-heal-ire.html#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 16:00:38 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=373706
David Best, who builds the enormous, gorgeous temples at Burning Man each year, created "Temple" in London/derry, where survivors of the Troubles have left memorials to their dead in advance of the temple being burned on Mar 21.]]>
David Best, who builds the enormous, gorgeous temples at Burning Man each year, created "Temple" in London/derry, where survivors of the Troubles have left memorials to their dead in advance of the temple being burned on Mar 21.

Templecraft is a Minecraft replica of Temple, set in a virtual London/derry, which will also "burn" on Saturday night, leaving nothing behind.
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http://boingboing.net/2015/03/19/burning-man-temple-to-heal-ire.html/feed0Irish government retroactively legalizes GCHQ surveillance revealed in Snowden docshttp://boingboing.net/2014/12/06/irish-government-retroactively.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/06/irish-government-retroactively.html#commentsSat, 06 Dec 2014 12:55:08 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=351684
As reported by The Irish Times on Saturday, 6th December; "Foreign law enforcement agencies will be allowed to tap Irish phone calls and intercept emails under a statutory instrument signed into law by Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald."

Colm adds,

The "statutory instrument" also allows telecoms companies to be sued in secret court sessions if they refuse to comply with requests for assistance from intelligence agencies, and to be barred from revealing that such proceedings took place.

]]>
As reported by The Irish Times on Saturday, 6th December; "Foreign law enforcement agencies will be allowed to tap Irish phone calls and intercept emails under a statutory instrument signed into law by Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald."

Colm adds,

The "statutory instrument" also allows telecoms companies to be sued in secret court sessions if they refuse to comply with requests for assistance from intelligence agencies, and to be barred from revealing that such proceedings took place.

This legislation was enacted the day after documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealing the undersea cables between Ireland and the UK were routinely tapped by GCHQ, were reported in German media.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/06/irish-government-retroactively.html/feed0UK psyops created N. Irish Satanic Panic during the Troubleshttp://boingboing.net/2014/10/10/uk-psyops-created-n-irish-sat.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/10/10/uk-psyops-created-n-irish-sat.html#commentsFri, 10 Oct 2014 16:00:21 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=337144
During the 1970s, when Northern Ireland was gripped by near-civil-war, British military intelligence staged the evidence of "black masses" in order to create a Satanism panic among the "superstitious" Irish to discredit the paramilitaries.]]>
During the 1970s, when Northern Ireland was gripped by near-civil-war, British military intelligence staged the evidence of "black masses" in order to create a Satanism panic among the "superstitious" Irish to discredit the paramilitaries.

Apparently, the thinking was that both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches would not tolerate Satanism, and that the idea of Satanism had entered the public consciousness thanks to movies like The Exorcist and The Devil Rides Out. If the tabloid press could convince the nation that paramilitaries were engaged in Satanic rituals, their public support would ebb.

“I think that Wallace and the Information Policy unit had two main objectives. First, it was to encourage a devout population to think that the Troubles had opened a door to ‘dark forces’ and to have them blame the paramilitaries by implication. The logic being: the ungodly paramilitaries caused the violence, the violence has encouraged all kinds of horrible things, ergo the devil, Satan and all that, although I don’t think that was ever going to fly.

“Second, there was the bonus of keeping people, especially teenagers and kids, off the streets at night.”

The years 1972-74 were among the bloodiest of the Troubles and a period when Northern Ireland teetered on the brink of civil war. It was also the era when Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups started carrying out ritualistic-style torture killings of Catholics and political opponents.

http://boingboing.net/2014/10/10/uk-psyops-created-n-irish-sat.html/feed0Coderdojo: global network of self-directed hacker schools for kidshttp://boingboing.net/2014/03/04/coderdojo-global-network-of-s.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/04/coderdojo-global-network-of-s.html#commentsTue, 04 Mar 2014 17:00:23 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=290318
Glenn sez, "An Irish programmer started with a club in Cork to teach (at no cost) kids aged 5 to 17 how to program.]]>
Glenn sez, "An Irish programmer started with a club in Cork to teach (at no cost) kids aged 5 to 17 how to program. It was such a hit that it's expanded to hundred of cities across 27 countries. CoderDojo has a template that includes self-directed learning with mentors on tap to help out. The notion is to provide kids a productive outlet. Among its successes is an average participation split about halfway between girls and boys in most chapters."

At 17, Whelton could also have become a black-hat hacker. He had gained some notoriety for hacking the latest iPod Nano and came into contact with other hackers. “I fell into a few of the chatrooms and forums talking to people with botnets of over 20,000 computers,” says Whelton. “I almost went down a bad path.”

“Someone offered me $50 to create a fake PayPal login page which would send the name and password to them. I couldn’t bring myself to send it,” he says. “When you get into those circles nothing that you do in real life matters to your social status. Hacking or defacing stuff is what you do to build up a name, particularly when you have no other outlets.”

“The technology world is a bit crazy with vanity metrics,” says Whelton. “We are interested in impact metrics: kids that are doing interesting stuff, kids who are finding new solutions to problems. The kids who eventually come out will be kids who can program, but with a social conscience.”

Ireland leads the EU in Freedom of Information fees, and they're the only EU nation that charges anything for an introductory query. Now they're raising those fees, potentially to infinity, through a law that charges you €15 per "unit" of government work necessary to answer your query. "Unit" isn't defined (government agencies get to make it up as they go along) and you have no way of predicting in advance how many units of work will go into your query.

This is actually a worsening of the already terrible FOI bill, which allowed Irish bureaucrats to determine reasonableness of queries based on how hard they'd be to answer if concerned records kept on paper -- even if those records were, actually, in a database that could be queried with a few keypresses.

Irish politicians have taken extraordinary measures to protect the state from the people finding out what it's up to. This is alarming on its face, and would be bad news even if Ireland was a paragon of good governance, and not a nation in economic meltdown that is subjecting its people to brutal austerity after being one of the centres of a corrupt investment bubble.

A new provision, an amendment to Section 12, is now proposed. If this amendment goes through, a single FOI request will cost you multiples of the outrageous current €15 fee. How many multiples will depend on how many administrative units, in a Department or office, are required to take action to answer your question. For every internal unit bestirring itself, you have to pay another €15.

As you can’t know in advance how many units any question will require to act in order to be answered, you can only guess how much any FOI request will cost. We can’t know the definition of “unit”, referred to as “different functional areas” [of the FOI body] each body will adopt.

Ireland is already the only European country that charges any fee at all for initial FOI inquiries. Before any changes, it is already the most expensive in the world.

Creating an arbitrary fee structure, limited only by a requirement that all costs charged be in multiples of €15 is, as Gavin Sheridan notes, a regression. It is a response contrary to an essential modern democratic right; to know what is done in the name of the public.

http://boingboing.net/2013/11/12/irish-freedom-of-information-a.html/feed0Irish government updates its Freedom of Information law with exciting new "Computers don't exist" provisionhttp://boingboing.net/2013/08/14/irish-government-updates-its-f.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/08/14/irish-government-updates-its-f.html#commentsWed, 14 Aug 2013 16:37:30 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=249958
When the Irish government updated its Freedom of Information law, it promised something fit for the computer era. To say it did not deliver is rather an understatement.]]>
When the Irish government updated its Freedom of Information law, it promised something fit for the computer era. To say it did not deliver is rather an understatement.

The new bill (PDF) says: "the FOI body shall take reasonable steps to search for and extract the records to which the request relates, having due regard to the steps that would be considered reasonable if the records were held in paper format."

Get that? The standard for whether a FOI request is reasonable is whether it would be easy to get if the records were on paper and in a filing cabinet. If the records can be retrieved from a database with one click, but would take a hundred years with a filing cabinet, then the records can remain secret forever, because clicking once is deemed unreasonable.

“the current legislation was essentially designed to deal primarily with paper records and the legislative framework for FOI needs to be updated to reflect the transformation that has taken place in ICT since that time

Now we know he meant that special laws to allow the state to pretend that the ICT transformation never happened should be brought in. Civil servants are to be empowered to pretend that computers haven’t been invented and all their records are paper ones.

http://boingboing.net/2013/08/14/irish-government-updates-its-f.html/feed0Faced with excommunication threat, Irish PM explains separation of church and state to Cardinalhttp://boingboing.net/2013/05/07/faced-with-excommunication-thr.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/05/07/faced-with-excommunication-thr.html#commentsWed, 08 May 2013 00:34:33 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=228716
The Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny if he held a scheduled vote on Ireland's new abortion law.]]>
The Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny if he held a scheduled vote on Ireland's new abortion law. He responded:

Everybody’s entitled to their opinion here but as explained to the Cardinal and members of the church my book is the constitution and the constitution is determined by the people. That’s the people’s book. We live in a Republic and I have a duty and responsibility as head of Government to legislate in respect of what the people’s wishes are.

Redditor bleacliath created a great graphic for this quote and posted it to /r/atheism.

Graham sez, "Nineties Irish indie feature HOW TO CHEAT IN THE LEAVING CERTIFICATE was recently remastered, and the 1080p telecine created from the original camera negative and is now available in full on YouTube - this film was very controversial in Ireland when first released (see late night Irish TV news report here) and some consider American movie THE PERFECT SCORE an inferior remake.

http://boingboing.net/2013/02/22/how-to-cheat-in-the-leaving-ce.html/feed9Irish town councillor tries to get state-owned piece of art removed from public galleryhttp://boingboing.net/2013/01/09/irish-town-councillor-tries-to.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/01/09/irish-town-councillor-tries-to.html#commentsWed, 09 Jan 2013 15:52:18 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=204718
A member of Athlone Town Council is trying to have a state-owned piece of art removed from a public art gallery.]]>
Niall de Buitlear sez,

A member of Athlone Town Council is trying to have a state-owned piece of art removed from a public art gallery.
The artwork by Shane Cullen features transcripts of messages smuggled in and out of the Long Kesh Prison by members of the IRA in the late 70s and early 80s. The work is part of the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and was made in the mid 90s.

Cllr Mark Cooney, of the main government party Fine Gael, tabled a motion calling for the removal of the work from the Luan Gallery, Athlone. Cllr Cooney, compared the work to a piece glorifying Hitler "extolling the merits of exterminating the Jewish population". Cllr Gabrielle McFadden also of Fine Gael supported Cllr Cooney saying that public galleries should not show politically contentious art.

Independent Cllr Sheila Buckley Byrne suggested the matter be referred to the board of Athlone Art and Heritage of which she and at least one other Councillor are members. The Councillors voted in favour of this proposal.

http://boingboing.net/2013/01/09/irish-town-councillor-tries-to.html/feed31Girls' crappy fake toy laptop is pink, and half as powerful as boys' crappy fake toy laptophttp://boingboing.net/2012/11/28/girls-crappy-fake-toy-laptop.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/11/28/girls-crappy-fake-toy-laptop.html#commentsWed, 28 Nov 2012 16:53:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=196941
Claudia, a Dublin-based reader of Sociological Images, clipped this image of a flier for an Irish shop that sells crappy fake toy laptops in gendered versions, with the blue male version getting twice as many "functions" as the pink female version.]]>
Claudia, a Dublin-based reader of Sociological Images, clipped this image of a flier for an Irish shop that sells crappy fake toy laptops in gendered versions, with the blue male version getting twice as many "functions" as the pink female version. Gwen at SocImg says, "Also, it looks more like a packet of birth control pills than a laptop."

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/28/girls-crappy-fake-toy-laptop.html/feed92Popemobile available for rent: stags, hen nights, and photo-opshttp://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/popemobile-available-for-rent.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/popemobile-available-for-rent.html#commentsTue, 27 Nov 2012 00:09:26 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=196116
The 1979 Irish Popemobile, an armoured car designed to exhibit the Pope on his visit, has been through a €60,000 makeover, and is now available for private hire:

According to a promotional pack, the vehicle has 15 seats, including the original “pope’s chair”.

]]>
The 1979 Irish Popemobile, an armoured car designed to exhibit the Pope on his visit, has been through a €60,000 makeover, and is now available for private hire:

According to a promotional pack, the vehicle has 15 seats, including the original “pope’s chair”. Mr Dunning plans to charge up to €300 an hour plus VAT for use of it .

He said the chair used by the pope was kept in his mother’s home in Greenhills, Dublin, while the vehicle’s makeover was completed.

“Nuns over from Rome were in my mother’s house to see it,” he said.

The promotional pack lists a number of possible uses, including “hen and stag [nights], debs and photo calls”.

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/26/popemobile-available-for-rent.html/feed15Irish president lambastes right wing US radio DJ over the politics of fearhttp://boingboing.net/2012/08/24/irish-president-lambastes-righ.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/24/irish-president-lambastes-righ.html#commentsFri, 24 Aug 2012 20:40:45 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=177993

Irish politicians are justly famed for their scathing wit, and if you've ever wondered why, listen to this clip of Irish president Michael D Higgins flaying alive Michael Graham, a US radio host, graduate of Oral Roberts University and supporter of the Tea Party movement.

]]>

Irish politicians are justly famed for their scathing wit, and if you've ever wondered why, listen to this clip of Irish president Michael D Higgins flaying alive Michael Graham, a US radio host, graduate of Oral Roberts University and supporter of the Tea Party movement. The recording dates to before Higgins won the presidency, but one imagines that political debate in Eire is a lot of fun these days.

From May 2010, an exchange between Michael D Higgins (who was elected President of Ireland last year) and Tea Party-loving radio guy Michael Graham on Irish radio.
Full exchange here.

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/24/irish-president-lambastes-righ.html/feed92MakeShop: a hackspace in Dublinhttp://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/makeshop-a-hackspace-in-dubli.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/makeshop-a-hackspace-in-dubli.html#commentsWed, 22 Aug 2012 05:12:16 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=177527
In the Irish Times, Ruth O'Connor documents a Dublin's new MakeShop, a hackerspace launched by the Science Gallery and open to adults and children alike.]]>
In the Irish Times, Ruth O'Connor documents a Dublin's new MakeShop, a hackerspace launched by the Science Gallery and open to adults and children alike. It sounds like a wonderful place.

Once inside, the staff’s enthusiasm finds them, glue guns poised, creating spinning robots from sawn-up dishwashing brushes and three-volt battery packs. Gearóid Keane one of the facilitators, who helps me make a bird house-shaped clock from a Gay Mitchell election poster, says that “The workshops last around 15 or 20 minutes so we get the kids’ full concentration. We get a wide range of ages but all really interested in what they are doing.”

While the target audience is 15- to 25-year-olds, people of all ages can attend the drop-in workshops. Adults and children sit side-by-side and there is a quiet sense of community interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter and excitement. Fionn Kidney of the Science Gallery says it’s about “Taking DIY and turning it into ‘Doing it Together’. It’s about developing a spark of discovery. We want to help young people find their interests.” Fundamentally, he says, MakeShop is about getting hands-on and creative, encouraging questioning and conversation.

Niall Hunt a 14-year-old from Sandymount in Dublin was making a badge – incorporating soldering techniques with learning about circuits by connecting LED lights to a battery. “I’ve always wanted to try soldering but never had the chance before,” says Niall, who likes the idea of a space where people can try out new things. With an interest in DIY, Niall’s dad John says that MakeShop provides access to materials he wouldn’t have at home as well as being an “ideas space”.

“I think it’s important to use our hands to take things apart, to figure out how things work and to fix things rather than constantly throwing stuff out.”

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/21/makeshop-a-hackspace-in-dubli.html/feed7TV "psychics" are stock photoshttp://boingboing.net/2012/06/27/tv-psychics-are-stock-phot.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/27/tv-psychics-are-stock-phot.html#commentsWed, 27 Jun 2012 14:50:36 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=167874
Peter sez, "This blog entry describes how Alan Rice, a student in Ireland, became suspicious about some of the photos displayed as 'Live psychics' to be called at €2.44/min on Irish TV.]]>
Peter sez, "This blog entry describes how Alan Rice, a student in Ireland, became suspicious about some of the photos displayed as 'Live psychics' to be called at €2.44/min on Irish TV. He used image searches to find photos of some of the 'psychics' on stock photo sites. Other people chipped in and..."

Psychic Pat was in fact a bought stock photo! I quickly tweeted about this and from that I was pointed to the boards.ie thread about the show where I posted the same photos. Things certainly took off from there and some wonderful people there started finding pretty much all the psychics listed on their website from various places around the internet including, from what I gather, a personal Flickr photo. It really begs the question who are you talking to? And in some cases from what I’ve read you only get through to a hold message.

Not only are these “psychics” giving out random pieces of information based on any detail they get from a caller they are exploiting some really vulnerable people who are desperately seeking hope for their current situation. In the brief time I watched last night there was even a call about a missing son for Christ’s sake!

How on earth can TV3 let this deplorable scam be aired and stand over this? It must be stopped from broadcasting and the money (€60 in some cases) returned to the callers.

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/27/tv-psychics-are-stock-phot.html/feed77Gone to Amerikay: masterful, heart-tugging Irish immigrant graphic novelhttp://boingboing.net/2012/04/30/gone-to-amerikay-mas.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/30/gone-to-amerikay-mas.html#commentsMon, 30 Apr 2012 13:23:24 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=157128Gone to Amerikay is a masterfully told tear-jerker of a graphic novel that tells the stories of multiple generations of Irish immigrants to New York, skilfully braided together.]]>Gone to Amerikay is a masterfully told tear-jerker of a graphic novel that tells the stories of multiple generations of Irish immigrants to New York, skilfully braided together. There's a storyline from 1870, the tale of Ciara O'Dwyer and her baby daughter who arrive in the Five Points slum ahead of Ciara's husband, who is meant to catch the next boat, but does not arrive. There's a storyline from 1960, in which a merchant seaman named Johnny McCormack jumps ship to become an actor, but instead ends up in folk-music-saturated Greenwich Village, discovering turbulent truths about his calling and his sexuality. Finally, there's a 2010 timeline in which a stratospherically wealthy Celtic Tiger CEO named Lewis Healy touches down in New York in his private jet so that his lover can give him a gift for the man who has everything: the secret history of a song that changed his life when he heard it as a child.

Writer Derek McColloch and illustrators Colleen Doran and Jose Villarrubia make this three-way narrative sing (literally, at times) by exploiting the unique visual storytelling capabilities of comics in ways rarely seen. Their masterful treatment boosts an already fine -- if sleight and sentimental -- tale into a higher orbit, giving it a velocity and a mass that makes the book both unstoppable and heart-tugging.

This is a sensitive treatment of race and class, sexuality and art, betrayal and gender, and above all, the immigrant experience in America. Like a great folk song, it is at once simple and complex, a paradoxical confection that could only have been rendered in graphic form.

http://boingboing.net/2012/04/30/gone-to-amerikay-mas.html/feed3Shredding company's awesome logohttp://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/shredding-companys-awesome-l.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/shredding-companys-awesome-l.html#commentsThu, 05 Apr 2012 16:26:49 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=153041 Snapped yesterday near my flat in east London, this Irish shredding company's logo on the back of their truck. Talk about "does what it says on the tin!"

http://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/shredding-companys-awesome-l.html/feed5Irish SOPA signed into lawhttp://boingboing.net/2012/03/01/irish-sopa-signed-into-law.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/01/irish-sopa-signed-into-law.html#commentsThu, 01 Mar 2012 08:04:44 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=146577
The "Irish SOPA" law, which makes provision for arbitrary, ISP-level national censorship without court orders, has been signed -- despite the law's unpopularity and the widespread protests against it.]]>
The "Irish SOPA" law, which makes provision for arbitrary, ISP-level national censorship without court orders, has been signed -- despite the law's unpopularity and the widespread protests against it.

The Irish Minister for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock, is insisting that the final version of the bill is much more limited than earlier proposals, and that it took guidance from recent EU Court of Justice rulings that say ISPs shouldn't have to be proactive about blocking. That still means that copyright holders can petition to force ISPs to block all access to various websites, and as we've seen in other countries in Europe, you can bet that the major record labels and studios will be doing just that very soon (if they haven't already) -- though their track record on properly calling out infringement isn't very good.

In this video from a European Central Bank press-conference in Ireland, journalist Vincent Browne demands that the ECB representative explain why the ECB required the Irish people to bail out a bank's uninsured creditors.

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In this video from a European Central Bank press-conference in Ireland, journalist Vincent Browne demands that the ECB representative explain why the ECB required the Irish people to bail out a bank's uninsured creditors. The bureaucrat mouths bland reassurances, then asserts (despite all appearances to the contrary) that the question has been resolved. Browne doesn't let up. It's quite a stirring spectacle.

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/22/irish-journalist-humiliates-eu.html/feed79Letter to Santa from 1911, found in a Dublin chimneyhttp://boingboing.net/2011/12/21/letter-to-santa-from-1911-fou.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/21/letter-to-santa-from-1911-fou.html#commentsThu, 22 Dec 2011 06:06:14 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=135548
This letter to Santa was written in 1911, and stashed in the chimney of a house in Dublin, from which it was recovered in 1992 by the house's current occupant, John Byrne.]]>
This letter to Santa was written in 1911, and stashed in the chimney of a house in Dublin, from which it was recovered in 1992 by the house's current occupant, John Byrne. The letter, written by "A or H Howard" (a brother-sister team) survived remarkably well, and is very lovely.

“I want a baby doll and a waterproof with a hood and a pair of gloves and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee.”